Website Description:“The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom’s second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982. Scottish and Irish editions of the daily paper were launched in 1947 and 2006 respectively. The Daily Mail was Britain’s first daily newspaper aimed at the newly-literate “lower-middle class market resulting from mass education, combining a low retail price with plenty of competitions, prizes and promotional gimmicks”, and was the first British paper to sell a million copies a day. It was at the outset a newspaper for women, the first to provide features especially for them, and as of the second-half of 2013 had a 54.77% female readership, the only British newspaper whose female readers constitute more than 50% of its demographic. It had an average daily circulation of 1,708,006 copies in March 2014. Between July and December 2013 it had an average daily readership of approximately 3.951 million, of whom approximately 2.503 million were in the ABC1 demographic and 1.448 million in the C2DE demographic. Its website has more than 100 million unique visitors per month.” (Wikipedia)

One of its website’s Alexa rank is 93 on January 01 2015. The website is one of the most popular websites in the United Kingdom.

The Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards problem has not been patched, while the XSS problem has been patched.

(1.1) Vulnerability Description:Daily online websites have a cyber security problem. Hacker can exploit it by Open Redirect (Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards) attacks. During the tests, all Daily mail websites (Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday & Metro media group) use the same mechanism. These websites include dailymail.co.uk, thisismoney.co.uk, and mailonsunday.co.uk.

These bugs were found by using URFDS (Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards Detection System).

(1.2) Description of Open Redirect:Here is the description of Open Redirect: “A web application accepts a user-controlled input that specifies a link to an external site, and uses that link in a Redirect. This simplifies phishing attacks. An http parameter may contain a URL value and could cause the web application to redirect the request to the specified URL. By modifying the URL value to a malicious site, an attacker may successfully launch a phishing scam and steal user credentials. Because the server name in the modified link is identical to the original site, phishing attempts have a more trustworthy appearance.” (From CWE)

(1.3) Vulnerability Disclosure:These vulnerabilities have not been patched.

(2) Daily Mail Website XSS Cyber Security Zero-Day Vulnerability

(2.1) Vulnerability description:DailyMail has a security problem. Criminals can exploit it by XSS attacks.

(2.2) What is XSS?“Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of computer security vulnerability typically found in web applications. XSS enables attackers to inject client-side script into web pages viewed by other users. A cross-site scripting vulnerability may be used by attackers to bypass access controls such as the same-origin policy. Cross-site scripting carried out on websites accounted for roughly 84% of all security vulnerabilities documented by Symantec as of 2007. Their effect may range from a petty nuisance to a significant security risk, depending on the sensitivity of the data handled by the vulnerable site and the nature of any security mitigation implemented by the site’s owner.” (Wikipedia)

“The Daily Telegraph is a British daily morning English-language broadsheet newspaper, published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B. Sleigh in June 1855 as The Daily Telegraph and Courier, and since 2004 has been owned by David and Frederick Barclay. It had a daily circulation of 523,048 in March 2014, down from 552,065 in early 2013. In comparison, The Times had an average daily circulation of 400,060, down to 394,448. The Daily Telegraph has a sister paper, The Sunday Telegraph, that was started in 1961, which had circulation of 418,670 as of March 2014. The two printed papers currently are run separately with different editorial staff, but there is cross-usage of stories. News articles published in either, plus online Telegraph articles, may also be published on the Telegraph Media Group’s http://www.telegraph.co.uk website, all under The Telegraph title.” (From Wikipedia)

(1) Vulnerability Description:

Telegraph has a Web security bug problem. It is vulnerable to XSS attacks. In fact, all its photo pages are vulnerable to XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) vulnerabilities. Telegraph’s picture pages use “&frame” as its parameter. All its web pages use “&frame” are vulnerable to the bugs. Those vulnerabilities have been patched now.

The vulnerability can be attacked without user login. Tests were performed on Firefox (37.02) in Ubuntu (14.04) and IE (8.0. 7601) in Windows 7. The bugs found by using CSXDS.

(2) XSS Description:

The description of XSS is: “Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks are a type of injection, in which malicious scripts are injected into otherwise benign and trusted web sites. XSS attacks occur when an attacker uses a web application to send malicious code, generally in the form of a browser side script, to a different end user. Flaws that allow these attacks to succeed are quite widespread and occur anywhere a web application uses input from a user within the output it generates without validating or encoding it.” (OWSAP)

“VuFind is a library resource portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of your library’s resources by replacing the traditional OPAC to include: Catalog Records, Locally Cached Journals, Digital Library Items, Institutional Repository, Institutional Bibliography, Other Library Collections and Resources. VuFind is completely modular so you can implement just the basic system, or all of the components. And since it’s open source, you can modify the modules to best fit your need or you can add new modules to extend your resource offerings. VuFind runs on Solr Energy. Apache Solr, an open source search engine, offers amazing performance and scalability to allow for VuFind to respond to search queries in milliseconds time. It has the ability to be distributed if you need to spread the load of the catalog over many servers or in a server farm environment. VuFind is offered for free through the GPL open source license. This means that you can use the software for free. You can modify the software and share your successes with the community! Take a look at our VuFind Installations Wiki page to see how a variety of organizations have taken advantage of VuFind’s flexibility. If you are already using VuFind, feel free to edit the page and share your accomplishments. “

(2) Vulnerability Details:

VuFind web application has a computer security problem. Hackers can exploit it by reflected XSS cyber attacks. This may allow a remote attacker to create a specially crafted request that would execute arbitrary script code in a user’s browser session within the trust relationship between their browser and the server.

Several other similar products 0-day vulnerabilities have been found by some other bug researchers before. VuFind has patched some of them. “scip AG was founded in 2002. We are driven by innovation, sustainability, transparency, and enjoyment of our work. We are completely self-funded and are thus in the comfortable position to provide completely independent and neutral services. Our staff consists of highly specialized experts who focus on the topic information security and continuously further their expertise through advanced training”.

“KnowledgeTree is open source document management software designed for business people to use and install. Seamlessly connect people, ideas, and processes to satisfy all your collaboration, compliance, and business process requirements. KnowledgeTree works with Microsoft® Office®, Microsoft® Windows® and Linux®.”

(2) Vulnerability Details:

KnowledgeTree web application has a computer security problem. Hackers can exploit it by reflected XSS cyber attacks. This may allow a remote attacker to create a specially crafted request that would execute arbitrary script code in a user’s browser session within the trust relationship between their browser and the server.

Several other similar products 0-day vulnerabilities have been found by some other bug hunter researchers before. KnowledgeTree has patched some of them. “Bugtraq is an electronic mailing list dedicated to issues about computer security. On-topic issues are new discussions about vulnerabilities, vendor security-related announcements, methods of exploitation, and how to fix them. It is a high-volume mailing list, and almost all new vulnerabilities are discussed there.”. It has listed similar exploits, such as Bugtraq (Security Focus) 32920.

Winmail Server web application has a computer security problem. Hackers can exploit it by reflected XSS cyber attacks. This may allow a remote attacker to create a specially crafted request that would execute arbitrary script code in a user’s browser session within the trust relationship between their browser and the server.

Several other similar products 0-day vulnerabilities have been found by some other bug hunter researchers before. Winmail Server has patched some of them. “scip AG was founded in 2002. We are driven by innovation, sustainability, transparency, and enjoyment of our work. We are completely self-funded and are thus in the comfortable position to provide completely independent and neutral services. Our staff consists of highly specialized experts who focus on the topic information security and continuously further their expertise through advanced training”. Scip has recorded similar XSS bugs, such as scipID 26980.

(2.1) The code flaw occurs at “&lid” parameter in “badlogin.php” page. In fact, CVE-2005-3692 mentions that “&retid” parameter in “badlogin.php” page is vulnerable to XSS attacks. But it does not mention “&lid” parameter”. The scipID of the bug is 26980. Bugtraq (SecurityFocus) ID is 15493. OSVDB ID is 20926.

“Your search to find the best photo gallery has led you to the most feature rich, best performing, and most widely used gallery available today. PhotoPost is the best way to offer your users the ability to upload, show off, share, discuss, and rate photos and videos on your site. We originally created PhotoPost in 2001 for TechIMO.com, our parent company’s own tech discussion website with 2 Million forum posts and 200,000 users, and within weeks we were inundated with requests, so we decided to develop it into a product. Over the past 8 years, PhotoPost has undergone more than 100 “dot” updates by a team of expert developers to add features, tweak performance, and maximize stability. Always in high demand, PhotoPost has been purchased by a staggering 14,500 websites. PhotoPost is most popular amongst vBulletin forum owners. That’s because we designed PhotoPost from the beginning to integrate efficiently with a website’s existing vBulletin forum, offering users one integrated login and registration instead of two, stylesheet integration, and other enhancements. But what PhotoPost does well for vBulletin owners, it does equally well for those that wish to integrate a gallery with many other forum types, or to simply add a photo gallery to their website with no forum at all. ”

(2) Vulnerability Details:

PhotoPost PHP web application has a computer security problem. Hackers can exploit it by XSS cyber attacks. This may allow a remote attacker to create a specially crafted request that would execute arbitrary script code in a user’s browser session within the trust relationship between their browser and the server.

Several other similar products 0-day vulnerabilities have been found by some other bug hunter researchers before. PhotoPost PHP has patched some of them. CXSECurity is a huge collection of information on data communications safety. Its main objective is to inform about errors in various applications. It also publishes suggestions, advisories, solutions details related to XSS vulnerabilities and cyber intelligence recommendations.

“PhotoPost can optionally integrate as an add-on to an existing forum on your site, and we do this extremely well. PhotoPost is a perfect fit with a forum, because sharing and discussing photos within PhotoPost comes naturally for a forum community.

With our forum integration, your users will use their existing forum account to login to PhotoPost, without needing to register again and maintain a separate account. Additionally, we offer stylesheet integrations with several forums to easily setup your PhotoPost gallery to match your forum’s look and feel, and with vBulletin 3.x we offer several additional enhancements.”

“GoDaddy is a publicly traded Internet domain registrar and web hosting company. As of 2014, GoDaddy was said to have had more than 59 million domain names under management, making it the world’s largest ICANN-accredited registrar. It serves more than 12 million customers and employs more than 4,000 people. The company is known for its celebrity spokespeople, Super Bowl ads and as being an online provider for small businesses. In addition to a postseason college football bowl game, it sponsors NASCAR. It has been involved in several controversies related to security and privacy. In addition to domain registration and hosting, GoDaddy also sells e-business related software and services.” (Wikipedia)

(2.1) When a user is redirected from Godaddy to another site, Godaddy will check whether the redirected URL belongs to domains Godaddy’s whitelist, e.g.
google.com
apple.com

If this is true, the redirection will be allowed.

However, if the URLs in a redirected domain have open URL redirection vulnerabilities themselves, a user could be redirected from Godaddy to a vulnerable URL in that domain first and later be redirected from this vulnerable site to a malicious site. This is as if being redirected from Godaddy directly.

One of the vulnerable domain is,
google.com

(2.2) Use one of webpages for the following tests. The webpage address is “http://diebiyi.com/articles/“. Can suppose that this page is malicious.

(3) What is Covert Redirect?Covert Redirect is a class of security bugsdisclosed in May 2014. It is an application that takes a parameter and redirects a user to the parameter value without sufficient validation. This often makes use of Open Redirect and XSS (Cross-site Scripting) vulnerabilities in third-party applications.

Covert Redirect is also related to single sign-on, such as OAuth and OpenID. Hacker may use it to steal users’ sensitive information. Almost all OAuth 2.0 and OpenID providers worldwide are affected. Covert Redirect can work together with CSRF (Cross-site Request Forgery) as well.